a note about me

I consider myself to be a non-typical, progressive Seventh-Day Adventist. I was raised a conservative Adventist and went through a combination of home-schooling and the Adventist educational system through college. I went to a secular educational institution for the first time for my Master’s degree (unless you count a few weeks of summer drivers’ ed at the local high school).

While my childhood would seem to be pretty good and non-traumatic from the outside, it left me with a ton of religious baggage that I have been working through ever since. The picture I saw of God’s love, as reflected by the people who claimed to represent Him, made me wonder if this was really love, and if it was, if it was even a good thing. I was also taught to know the difference between right and wrong, and I honor my parents for that. However, everything was framed in terms of right and wrong. No shades of gray were allowed. As I grew older, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with this limited view. I yearned to know God, but all the while I was terrified that He would turn out to really be like the worst version of God that I could imagine. My beliefs started to shift slightly away from those of my parents; as they did, I was excited by the new, personal and loving God that I was getting to know, but also scared to be venturing out of the world where all the rights and wrongs were safely defined.

I am still on that journey: still haunted by my early view of God, still occasionally longing for the certainty of knowing exactly where all the lines are drawn, and still thrilled to occasionally get a better view of our awesome God.

During the school year when I am at home (I am on the west coast for an internship currently) I go to church online at the Forest Lake web church. I would prefer going to a ‘real-life’ church, but there aren’t any around where I feel I can go for real spiritual nourishment and fellowship. I would love to be able to meet with fellow believers who embrace the ‘generous Adventist orthodoxy‘ that Marcel of Re-inventing the Adventist Wheel describes. Since I can’t get that locally, I take the online version.

Finally, a few words about why I am blogging anonymously. It kind of goes against the grain for me to not say who I am, since I generally believe in personal accountability and all that. There are a couple reasons I am not doing so here. First, I don’t necessarily want my family (especially my parents) to know everything I am thinking along these lines; I know that I have already caused my very conservative Adventist parents quite a bit of pain by doing things like drinking coffee and getting my ears pierced, so I would like to avoid causing more. The second and perhaps not quite so honorable reason is that as I am beginning my professional life I don’t want the first Google hit for my name to come to this blog. This is NOT to say that I am ashamed of my faith: I will happily tell anyone that I am a Christian, and I hope that my life also testifies to that fact.

That said, if any of my (at this point extremely hypothetical) readers would really like to know who I am, I will probably tell them if they email me and ask nicely. =)

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~ by HW on July 13, 2008.